Obliterating the Woman

Since it is such a hot topic this week, I wanted to collect together some thoughts on the difficulties anti-abortion advocates run into when dealing with the case of rape that results in pregnancy.

I think we can explain both why Senate candidate Richard Mourdock resorted to a short exposition of theodicy in an answer to a tough question on abortion rights, and come around to why so many people find the normal pro-life answers cruel-sounding.

My own suggestion would be that if your reasoning process leads to a conclusion this goofy – that a rape victim must be compelled to bear her assailant’s child – then perhaps you ought to check your work. There’s an error in there somewhere.

I don’t know the best way to defend the absolutist pro-life position, but I think it has to start with an acknowledgment that hating the baby that is the product of violence, and hating the burden of carrying that baby, is an entirely normal and human reaction. That the burden of carrying this hated life is, from a human perspective, a cosmic injustice that compounds the original injustice of the rape. That burden may still be unavoidable, ethically – may be your “cross to bear” from a Christian perspective, or the “passion” that you have to transcend to see the right from a Stoical perspective, or whatever. But at least starting there means acknowledging and trying to identify with the rape victim’s perspective on the situation, rather than, as is usually the case, identifying exclusively with the baby, and consequently obliterating the woman from view.

Now before coming around to my response to these views, let’s do some preliminary work.

The abortion debate is usually conducted in the abstract. And both sides of that debate resort to liberal and reactionary principles to defend their positions. Often the logic of these is wound very closely together.

For instance, pro-lifers make reactionary arguments about the duties we owe one another. I often make this argument: that biological parents have ordinary duties to the children they conceive: to feed, clothe, and educate them. Obviously this sense of responsibility means not deliberately causing the death of their child in the womb. It’s own DNA testifies to the parentage of the two individuals who conceived it.

Pro-lifers more often resort to liberal argumentation: the unborn child has a right to life. This right must be guaranteed by the force of law. The unborn child’s rights must be respected whatever our feelings. It is a unique human with its own unique DNA.

On the other side, pro-choicers usually resort to liberal arguments: A woman has a right to choose an abortion. It is a medical procedure and no one else can have a say in it.

But the same pro-choice argument can be stated in a way that sounds downright reactionary. This argument appeals to a woman’s self-ownership. It is “my body, my choice.” This ownership excludes all claims of rights by others that are enforced by the state.

Now on the liberal side, “rights-focused” arguments start running into trouble the moment that specifics are filled in. The Gallup polling on abortion testifies to this. Outside of an ideological hard-core, people have a hard time saying that a healthy woman who deliberately had consensual sex without using contraception has an unlimited right to a later-term abortion. Nor do people like the idea of saying people have a right to use abortion as a sex-selection method in their children.

On the conservative side, the case of rape obliterates most of the pro-lifer’s argument that abortion is a violation of our normal duties to children we conceive. In the case of rape, a woman did not make a choice to engage in potentially reproductive behavior. In fact, it is precisely because the consequences of rape are so grave that many conservatives still feel it should be a capital crime.

But there is a problem with pro-lifers resorting to their normal “liberal” case against abortion in the case of rape. And I think this is why Frum and Millman (who are to different degrees sympathetic to pro-lifers) start to pull back. Millman is right that if pro-life absolutists use this case it seems to “obliterate” the woman, a victim of a crime, altogether.

Rights-focused argumentation works most powerfully when it is used in an emancipatory way against the powerful. That is why it is much more powerful when used by workers against a plutocratic capitalist. The plutocrat’s appeal to his status as “owner” is weak against the appeal of downtrodden workers.

And a victim of rape is in no way analogous to a well-off CEO. Carrying a baby, a living reminder of a violent crime, is something much more traumatic than losing a percentage of excess profits. I think this is why Millman describes the abortion of an unborn child conceived by rape as a way for the victim “to prove her physical autonomy.” In this case, Millman conceives of the abortion not too differently from the way reactionary Murray Rothbard did; a woman owns her body and therefore, like any property owner, she has a right to evict a trespasser.

So in a political debate in the midst of a political campaign, a pro-life politician might make the normal abstract case for why he is pro-life. Usually this is stated in just the normal abstract liberal fashion.

Frum is right that pro-lifers sound “goofy” if, when posed a question about a pregnancy that results from rape, the candidate resorts to a series of disembodied Enlightenment concepts. I agree. It does sound weirdly dogmatic and obtusely ideological to tell a rape victim that an unborn child has unalienable rights, and in this case those are going to impinge on her in the months following the most traumatic moment of her life.

And yet, I still believe abortion in this case is wrong. And so does Richard Mourdock.

So he did something rather natural for a human being and for a politician: he resorted to an (awkward) theological point.

As a politician it allows him to escape the bind of responding to that hard question by resorting to pro-life arguments about when life begins, or the facts of biology. It is a way of saying, “I know this is difficult but I’d like to move on.”

Mourdock stated things poorly, and did in fact make it sound like a baby is a “silver lining” to rape. And Millman is right to deplore that. Yes, pregnancy makes a rape worse for the victim. I think he meant to say that the life lived by a person conceived in rape has great intrinsic value.

But precisely because the normal rhetoric of the pro-life movement is ideological (even emancipatory), because it is a series of Enlightenment principles that can seem disconnected from real life, I think Mourdock’s instinct to abandon it and then invoke, through his tears, a God who can bring great goodness out of unbelievable tragedy is a deeply human response.

Many advocates of legal abortion say that abortion is a tragedy. If it is a tragedy that 41 percent of all pregnancies in New York City end in abortion, then abortion is also a second tragedy (and not a silver lining) in the case of rape. The much maligned Rick Santorum would say, “one violence is enough.”

Real shattering injustices do have a way of making facile pieties evaporate. Those pieties may be liberal, reactionary, or even Christian. And politics isn’t normally the best place to address them. We wouldn’t tell the widow whose husband was shot that her grief is fully addressed by a new tough-sentencing law.

So, if I may respond to my friends David and Noah, I also find something inadequate about ideological answers to rape victims, from both sides. There is something weirdly inhuman about standing behind this legal tragedy as the primary and exhaustive response of our society to a woman impregnated by a rape. As Noah puts it, “That’s tough stuff.”

I prefer the response of a pious teary-eyed naïf who talks of impossible mysteries, yes, but also compassion.

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35 Responses to Obliterating the Woman

We can construct hard cases – the rape victim is locked away for 9 months ans is undergoing labor when the police finally break down the door… can they kill the baby?

Rothbard’s misconstructions normally have the woman as negligent, if she allowed a life uniquely dependent on her to come into existence she can still kill it, just as someone on a boat who throws a party can toss overboard an invitee who gets drunk and is an unintentional stow-away.

There should be technology if not theology which would kill the sperm and/or the egg before it becomes a zygote. Conception is not instantaneous. Is contraception which does not abort licit in the case of rape?

Or, I strand you and a wheel-chair bound person in the middle of Alaska at the onset of winter. You might leave, but it would mean the death of this disabled person.

Is life more important than liberty and property? Or are they co-equal, allowing you to shoot trespassers without warning? Perhaps in drone strikes.

Lost in the shuffle is that rape is a capital offense. IOW at one time we used to execute the guilty party.
But now being a baby is a capital offense and we generally execute innocent parties, rape or no, if we can even agree on how to define rape, which was the upshot of the whole Akin thing contra the feminist post modern reinterpretation.
Neanderthal that we might be, somehow I don’t think that justice or equity is served.

I’m Pro-Choice but it infuriates me when people on my side of the issue resort to the twisting of words and dismissal of the main argument like they did with Mourdock (on my blog, http://www.soulhonky.com I compared it to the Right twisting Obama’s “You didn’t build that.”)
To have any sort of discussion, you have to see the other side’s argument. And if you put yourselves in the shoes of someone who believes life begins at conception, it isn’t hard at all to see why they would argue in favor of the life of the child. I think everyone believes that nobody should pay for the sins of their father and that is quite literally what the innocent child would be doing here. And the child would be paying for it with their life. I really don’t understand how people find this to be “goofy” or hard to figure out.
Frum’s statement is simply dismissive but Millman’s might be more obnoxious because it assumes the worst about the other side; that they don’t understand the pain and anguish that the pregnancy would cause. Too often, the Pro-Choice argument devolves to “You don’t understand!” While that was painfully true with Todd Akin, I think it’s untrue with most Pro-Lifers and doesn’t seem apply to Mourdock.

“David Frum says, My own suggestion would be that if your reasoning process leads to a conclusion this goofy – that a rape victim must be compelled to bear her assailant’s child – then perhaps you ought to check your work. There’s an error in there somewhere.”

This, as so much of the debate, completely misses the essential point, which is that, at least at some point after conception and at some time before birth, the fetus is a child, and, secondly, that shit happens and that this is part of life.

One of the most egregiously stupid of modern errors is to think that, somehow, we — we moderns! — can escape reality by sheer dint of desire; the gross mistake of thinking that we are not subject to the many conditions that make up our world, and which inevitably lead to pain as well as pleasure. But bad things, even tragic things, happen: we all experience it, even if in very small ways; it is part of life and the reasonable human being accepts of these what he cannot change and sets himself to deal with it. Rape must be horrible in ways utterly unimaginable to a man, but that does not refute the unfortunate — or fortunate? Whose fortune? — reality that the fetus so conceived, at least after a certain point, is a child and not a cancerous growth. As tragic as the fate of a mother who must bear this unwanted child, is it more tragic than the fate of the child who is killed before it is even born? Does the mother – do any of us, especially us commentators – value our own lives so cheaply?

The real crux of the matter is: what is life for? If this fleshly life we experience everyday is all there is, then fine, logically a woman could well abort all her babies conceived in any way you care to describe; and so, logically, could any person kill you and me and anyone else whom he might choose to find even minor inconveniences to his desires.

You pays your money and takes your choice. Either human life has some absolute meaning — which is intelligible only if there is something about man that is greater than and somehow transcends this quotidian fleshly life – and this fleshly life is good! No need of an argument to prove that! — in which case: be careful what you do to that unborn child, whose destiny transcends your own temporary plight! Or else it has no such trans-carnal meaning: in that case, realize that while you may in perfect logic abort any child you please, someone else may just as logically kill you for his own convenience. Let us not be sentimentalists.

I’ll be interested to see if other women weigh in on this article – but I will. I have personally been on all sides of the abortion issue so I have what the left likes to call “moral authority” on the subject. My views on abortion are not “in the abstract.”

At any rate, I, like most people, understand the first impulse of a woman who is pregnant from a rape is to want to get rid of the evidence, the memory, the gene pool. This may, in fact, be a good idea. It really depends on the circumstances and the rapist and what is known about him, doesn’t it? See the DOJ’s “Criminal Victimization in the United States, Statistical Tables” for enlightening statistics. Don’t like the sound of that? I refer you to http://mba.yale.edu/faculty/pdf/kahn_mixed_race.pdf for one good study. There are others (Steve Sailer probably has access to other studies with similar studies.)

If the woman who is raped and pregnant and single, this situation presents a burden on her and on the child. If her family turns away from her, it’s worse. So what you say? Sacrifice! If she is married and has children, still other burdens on her and the child (and the other children, and the husband). So what, you say? Sacrifice! Should “everyone come together” in a situation like that? Sure, but fat chance it will work out quite so perfectly, because the problem is, people are human. Think about your own wives, men.

Now the baby can be put up for adoption – there are many couples in the US who would love to adopt a newborn baby. Although many couples show a preference for certain kinds of babies. As an adoptive parent, I can tell you my husband and I had no problem and no extensive wait when we adopted our newborn because we had not read any studies and we had an open mind. While other couples we knew waited for the perfect white baby we were already making our own baby food. We were blessed with a wonderful mixed race baby, the result of a sad situation, and we consider ourselves extremely fortunate. But babies of rape are not so warmly welcomed by adoptive parents. Judge those would-be parents if you want. We’re only human, after all.

Let’s also remember that even those who claim to be pro-choice like Hilary Clinton are quite vocal and staunch on the American woman’s “right to choose” when it comes to the 20 or 30 something on her way up the ladder who has found herself with a problem after an indiscreet weekend, or a poor American single mother fearful she cannot feed another mouth after a careless jaunt. Because Americans should never be expected to curb their sexual desires, or so the theory goes.

Except she changes her tune when lecturing Asians that that they shouldn’t consider sex-selection abortions. She told the New York Times in 2009,

“Obviously, there’s work to be done in both India and China, because the infanticide rate of girl babies is still overwhelmingly high, and unfortunately with technology, parents are able to use sonograms to determine the sex of a baby, and to abort girl children simply because they’d rather have a boy. And those are deeply set attitudes.”

We also know that progressives look to Margaret Sanger for inspiration while denying her early eugenics is still part of the abortion rights movement. That’s nonsense, of course, because even Ruth Ginsburg echoed those sentiments to the New York Times a few years ago when she said with candor, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. ” It hasn’t quite turned out that way but that is a discussion for another time.

As I said, I’ve been on all sides of the issue. Abortions have been performed for thousands of years. As you know, abortion was legal in the United States from the time the earliest settlers arrived. When the Constitution was adopted, abortions before “quickening” were advertised without shame, and routinely performed. This does not make them “right” but it does make it a reality.

There are also numerous intelligent discussions on the earliest stages of pregnancy and what it means regarding “life” and “humanness”.

The bottom line, however, is that while I see abortion as a sad and despicable fact of life particularly when used as a form of birth control, which it too often is. Late term abortions are barbaric and the acceptance of them is the sign of a civilization in decline. But I also know that making early term abortion illegal is a fool’s folly. It is a difficult decision that should be made by a woman ultimately, along with her doctor and the person or partner in her life, if she is fortunate enough to have one – no matter the circumstances.

Finally, just as it is unseemly for men to advocate enthusiastically for abortion rights, it is equally unseemly for them to advocate they be banned – because we only talk about it in the abstract. It is not abstract for the woman who is pregnant.

@Patrick Moore “at least at some point after conception and at some time before birth, the fetus is a child”

But at what point? If it was a fully formed human, then the child could live independent of the mother in a biological sense.

“ that shit happens and that this is part of life.”

So is death. Sometimes death is better than suffering. There are many things in this world worse than death.

“One of the most egregiously stupid of modern errors is to think that, somehow, we — we moderns! — can escape reality by sheer dint of desire; the gross mistake of thinking that we are not subject to the many conditions that make up our world,”

But we are subject to the notion that our life has infinite value that must be preserved at all costs no matter who it hurts?

“ fetus so conceived, at least after a certain point, is a child and not a cancerous growth”

A child that causes unbearable psychological pain to the mother. I would argue that is worse than death. If abortion is banned in all cases,do you think we would see a rise in the number of suicides among women who were impregnated by rape?

“ do any of us, especially us commentators – value our own lives so cheaply?”

My life does not have infinite value. I have come to accept this. The value of human life must be balanced with the need to reduce human suffering. That is my view.

I think the first thing that needs to happen, to even have a logical discussion, is we need to define rape. I do not accept that a college girl who gets drunk, has sex and wakes up the next day and feels guilty, was raped. I don’t accept that a woman who changes her mind during intercourse was raped. I believe that the Central Park Jogger was raped. Feminists have become very good at calling everything “rape” and so the statistics of pregnancy due to rape are skewed. Garbage in, garbage out. Let’s have an honest premise and then hash it out from there.

My second point is that with ever improving technology, babies are able to live outside of the womb earlier and earlier. 20 years ago, it was unthinkable to have a baby at 22 weeks and yet, I met the very same baby when my son was in the NICU almost 8 years ago. I get very frustrated with people, like Gary Johnson, who say, up to 3 months, abortion is fine but not afterwards. So, is it a baby at 90 days but not 89? What if the woman’s cycle was off? Due dates are estimates, at best. So, would you be okay with killing a baby if there was a chance that the baby was actually past the 90 day mark? Shouldn’t we err on the side of caution? Isn’t our death penalty dragged on with some 20+ appeals out of an abundance of caution, leaning toward life? Should we not do the same with a baby?

How selfish can a woman be to not give up her figure for 5 months (the first 4 are pretty much a wash – trust me I know VERY well) so that she can bring a life into the world even if it isn’t hers to watch grow? What is 5, 6 months really, in the scheme of things? Girls say, oh I just couldn’t give birth and then give the baby away… but they’d kill it without a 2nd thought? Women act as if pregnancy occurs when you get struck by lightning, walking down the street. How about this – use your brain and close your legs a few times a month to prevent that decision from ever having to be made. Are we cats or dogs to have sex indiscriminately, unable to pause, think it through? How disgusting has our society become where we DEMAND the right to have sex whenever, wherever, with whomever and then when the natural consequence materializes, we DEMAND that everyone else be damned – it’s my body and I can do what I want with it! Well, it was your body before you chose to get knocked up – why didn’t you do something for your body then? Argh – I hate this conversation. I detest the people who are so vile as to easily dismiss with life because they are so weak.

There are whole nations that are past the point of regeneration. They have 103 abortions for every 100 births. Abortion is the scourge of the modern, enlightened society. It’s God’s way of saying “fine, you know best? Then I will populate the world with those people who are not as educated, not as civilized. And then see what your arrogance, your selfishness, has wrought.”

Answer: The decrees of God are his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 7.

I believe this may the source of Richard Mourdock’s understanding of the place of rape in the Will of God. How do we account for the fact of evil in the world if we believe that God is both all good, and cannot be the author of evil, and God is all powerful, and nothing can be done to thwart His will? A kernel is found in the Book of Genesis, in which Joseph confronts his brothers with the fact of their perfidy in having sold him into slavery, from which origin was precipitated the order of events which culminated in his becoming ruler over Egypt, and thereby Savior of the children of Israel: “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” Genesis 50:20 (KJV).

Mourdock’s detractors (most of whom I would wager would earn failing grades in a first year course in Reformed Theology) are scandalized by the notion that God might bring something good out of the evil intended by a man who rapes a woman. But I believe this is true.

What Mourdock may wish to contemplate, however, for it follows as unswervingly from the principles which underlie his answer to that question, is that God intends to bring something good out of the evil intended by every woman who aborts her unborn child.

This is an important principle to contemplate and pray over when we come before the Lord in the worship which is His due. But it does not necessarily clarify the question of how the law is to be enforced in human courts when it must be applied to those who, like their judges, are humans broken by their sinful nature.

Back in the 1970’s, when Roe v. Wade was still fresh news and fresh law, we Young Republicans debated the question of whether to outlaw abortions, and the point of division was never between affirming a right to choose against a right to life, but always over whether to allow an exception in cases of rape or incest or danger to the life of the mother. Men like Mourdock and Akin and the others whose statements have scandalized even today’s Republicans had their thoughts on this issue formed and forged in the furnace of that debate. And when the “no exception” side emerged the victor in these debates, as it generally did, it was on the basis of one argument – that punishment of abortion only when arising from an instance of a woman’s sin was inadmissible in a society which vows to leave to God alone the punishment of sin. The only legitimate purpose to outlaw and punish abortion in a free society is to protect the life of the innocent, which is indisputably the case of every child conceived in an act of rape as it is of every other.

Over the years of my life I have come to see that enforcing principles of justice with that scrupulosity for dogma is insufficient to the task of governing real people in the world of real human heartache and the striving to cope with it. The error on the other side of that battle of dogma, that of Murray Rothbard, that children “uninvited” into their mother’s womb may be evicted as trespassers, was repeated at the Ron Paul rally prior to the Republican National Convention in Tampa by Prof. Walter Block. He was the only speaker among those with many disparate views whose words were met with jeers and derision.

Even libertarians have a hard time living with the logical deductions of their dogma. Can one expect any better of Republicans?

I do not want to wade into a philosophical or theological debate on abortion. From an American political standpoint however, an artificial division of the duopoly into a staunchly pro-choice party and a staunchly pro-life party has unintentionally created the issue of inarticulate politicians voicing very controversial statements on abortion.

My now abandoned ultra-devout Catholic upbringing instilled in me a duty to always vote Republican. Don’t think; just pull the R levers. Elephants all the way across the row. This strategy has in part facilitated the rise of politicians such as Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. While I can’t speak of Akin’s or Mourdock’s inner thoughts, I agree with David Frum’s assessment of their comments as callous and ignorant of practical realities. Still, many devout Christians vote for the pol with the 100% NRLC rating without a thought. Maybe pro-life voters should consider not just a politician’s devotion to the pro-life cause or voting record, but his or her ability to succinctly articulate key pro-life points.

I once hoped that Mitt Romney’s pro-choice abortion position would spark debate on the Right over the best way to present pro-life tenets to voters. Sadly, many pro-lifers are more focused on boosting Mitt into office just so he can push a ultra-conservative SCOTUS pick through Congress. GOP pro-lifers can’t rely on justices alone to advance abortion restriction or even criminalization.

I think calling Mourdock’s statement awkward misses an important point. Mourdock put himself in the position of “knowing” what God intends.

Mourdock said, “I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen,”

I realize that some Protestant Denominations believe in predestination/God plans everything, but other Christians do not claim to know what God intends or that God planned a specific situation. In an all girl grade school level Sunday school class at a Southern Baptist Church, the teacher told us that God had already selected our future husbands. There are verses in the Bible that can be used to argue both sides.

If God intended a horrible situation of rape, does that mean a person that commits rape has a right to a legal defense that God told me to do it because God plans everything?

“Enlightenment principles that can seem disconnected from real life, I think Mourdock’s instinct to abandon it and then invoke, through his tears, a God who can bring great goodness out of unbelievable tragedy is a deeply human response.”

I think Mourdock’s statement demonstrates the inconsistency or difficult to understand question of why God allows terrible things to happen. As with Patrick Moore’s comment, “shit happens and that this is part of life” I find it to be callus, simplistic, and lacking in debt of the life altering reality of having a baby from rape. Most individuals that want to make abortion illegal are the same individuals that are against government assistance for poor/low income women struggling to raise a baby by herself.

If the father is indentified, is he going to pay child support? He should be in prison for life; however, many women do not want to go through the ordeal of a trial where her life will be examined for some excuse that she is falsely claiming rape (Todd Akins – “legitimate” rape).

I agree with much of what Karen said, especially “But I also know that making early term abortion illegal is a fool’s folly.” Making abortion illegal will not stop abortions, except for the poor women that cannot afford safe abortions – back alley abortions for poor women.

“According to WHO and Guttmacher, approximately 68,000 women die annually as a result of complications of unsafe abortion; and between two million and seven million women each year survive unsafe abortion but sustain long-term damage or disease (incomplete abortion, infection (sepsis), haemorrhage, and injury to the internal organs, such as puncturing or tearing of the uterus). They also concluded abortion is safe in countries where it’s legal, but dangerous in countries where it’s outlawed and performed clandestinely.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_abortion

@Patrick Moore “at least at some point after conception and at some time before birth, the fetus is a child”.

You ask pertinent questions, and it is hugely refreshing to come across a comment on these pages that is not largely irrelevant to the essential issue at hand. Thank you. See below, between the lines.

But at what point? If it was a fully formed human, then the child could live independent of the mother in a biological sense.
But – says who? The traditional view is that the fetus becomes human at the point where the body is sufficiently elaborated to support the human soul, and this was considered to be after the first trimester; thus abortion before the end of the first trimester, give or take (note!) would not be murder of a child. One of the huge glories, difficulties, and responsibilities of a woman is precisely that she is sole master of someone else’s life for nine months and principal master for 18 or so years thereafter. It is a burden most men would shrink from if they knew its scope.

Note that this question of the advent of humanity is as much a philosophical as a scientific question, because the definition of “human being” is not a scientific but a philosophical one.

Note too that the assertion that “human life begins at conception”, at least strictu sensu, can’t be right at least per traditional views on human generation. It may be a worthwhile, grosso modo, general principle on which to base moral and legal judgments about abortion, but that is an entirely different question.

“ that shit happens and that this is part of life.”
So is death. Sometimes death is better than suffering. There are many things in this world worse than death.

Yes indeed, but the point to remember, once again, is that if human life is more than the fleshly life we experience in a quotidian manner – and by “flesh” I don’t mean sex or even meat, I mean St. Paul’s sense of the human consciousness identified with the outward, mutable and corruptible body (as if there were nothing else for our consciousness to identify with) – if there is more to human life than this, then perhaps we are not the final owners of our own existence, and then perhaps there are standards other than pleasure and pain to judge the final value of this or that experience. This question can be elucidated by recourse to patristic study, or, if you prefer, to traditional Hindu doctrine, among others, of the nature and becoming of the human being, and of the distinction and hierarchy among its parts.

“One of the most egregiously stupid of modern errors is to think that, somehow, we — we moderns! — can escape reality by sheer dint of desire; the gross mistake of thinking that we are not subject to the many conditions that make up our world,”
But we are subject to the notion that our life has infinite value that must be preserved at all costs no matter who it hurts?

The point has in itself nothing to do with the value of life, infinite or not. I don’t agree at all that our quotidian physical life has infinite value; that conflicts both with Christian doctrine, common sense, history, and the universal teaching of all traditions. If anything, it is a modern, not a traditional doctrine. But the point is nonethless well raised, for it again brings us to the question: Wherein exactly lies the value of human life? If it is merely the values of this mortal and corruptible body, and its life, alone — that is, finally, pleasure and pain, then as above. But if the traditions are right and there are elements to the human being transcending the body – namely, schematically, the soul, and spirit (that enlighteneth – = consciousness — every man coming into the world) – then questions of value have to go beyond questions of pleasure and pain.

“ fetus so conceived, at least after a certain point, is a child and not a cancerous growth”
A child that causes unbearable psychological pain to the mother. I would argue that is worse than death. If abortion is banned in all cases,do you think we would see a rise in the number of suicides among women who were impregnated by rape?

That may all be true. But it leaves the original issue: if the child (we are assuming that the fetus has become a human being) is more than its enlivened body, then it must have a purpose and therefore rights that have to be weighed on their own. The child’s life may be the mother’s tragedy: but this tragedy would not per se justify killing the child. I say this understanding as far as I can the full import of the phrase “mother’s tragedy”.

And so too, we well might see an increase in suicides among raped women, but that is logically irrelevant to the issue as stated. Once again: grant the mother in such cases and with such givens the right to kill the 2nd or 3rd trimester child, and you open up the logical gate to the right of anyone else to take the mother’s – or yours or my – life too.

“ do any of us, especially us commentators – value our own lives so cheaply?”
My life does not have infinite value. I have come to accept this. The value of human life must be balanced with the need to reduce human suffering. That is my view.

This is odd: Life/Value versus Pleasure/Pain. Please state why your pleasure should not come at the expense of others’ pain. Or what justifies others’ pleasure at the cost of your pain? The question very obviously can’t be resolved at the level of pleasure and pain – that is, by reference merely to our quotidian fleshly life as defined above.

Your sentiments are nobler than your reasoning. Of course we all sense that there is more to the human being than that part that experiences pleasure and pain; that indeed there is something quasi absolute about a being with human consciousness. No one really and with full consciousness is a mere materialist. But again and again, this issue therefore involves something that transcends that part of us that merely experiences pleasure and pain, and that reasons in order to augment the first and diminish the latter.

The folks who despise Mourdock don’t know theology and don’t care about it. To them the theology is as repugnant as those who hold to it are despicable. That is the important thing to remember. Pro-lifers come off as despicable human beings. The arguments are irrelevant. The theology is beyond irrelevant.

Now lets look at the numbers, accepting for the moment the stats that are thrown around.

Start with the 52% that believes that abortion may be prevented in some or all cases. The 20% that opposes it in all cases are a part of that number and to add them to it to create the illusion of an overwhelming majority opposed to abortion is simply a flat out lie. It does not work that way and pro lifers only end up deluding themselves in the process.

Now, take the 25% number that believes that there should be no control on abortion. Ok but that forgets that if 52% support some form of control, then that leaves 48% who do not, not 25%. So you have 25% hard core but that is a super hard core which is part of a 48% which de facto holds their position but is not telling the pollsters.

Ok, now let’s remove the issues of sex selected abortion, which cannot be controlled no matter what laws would be in place because the woman can always just lie, and late term abortion. Now that number drops from the 52% back down to the 20%.

So what you are left with is a serious minority being pandered to by people whom the rest of the country views as vile human beings.

At some point, it will be technologically feasible to clone a human being from any somatic cell. When that point arrives — when any fully-formed strand of human DNA is a potential “life” — will it be murder to have your tonsils removed?

I am a pro-choice woman who was forcibly raped by a maniac at the age of 21 in 1969. Would you be interested in reading my take?

I was pro-choice even before that event. When I was in high school and learned that there were state anti-abortion laws, I was horrified that any person in the US believed he or she had a right to any decision-making regarding my sex organs except me. Those laws were a violation of liberty so great that they were almost beyond imagination.

After I was raped, I was a responsible victim who reported the rape, etc., only to learn that there would be about a 1% chance of conviction. Since I was raped the night after I arrived at an out-of-state university and wanted to go home to recuperate, I arranged for a school refund. I gave up a merit fellowship to leave.

After I had done the responsible thing for about three days, the reporting, medical exam, police search, decisions, notification of family, I had to deal with the possibility of pregnancy from rape. That is because, in those days, there was no Plan B and no home pregnancy test. All one could do is wait to see whether or not one was pregnant.

In my waiting, I found that I could no longer say the words, “I was raped,” or even write them. I would stutter at the “r” or my hand would shake uncontrollably. This from a girl who had studied acting for over a decade and was so fluent a writer as to have been editor of a college lit magazine. I could have said to a doctor,I want an abortion, but I literally could not have said the necessary words, “I was raped.”

In my state, abortion was allowed in a case of rape. But what did that mean? If I were able to tell a doctor I had been raped, would he or she agree to perform an abortion? The doctor would have to seek permission at a hospital from a committee of 12 doctors – would they agree? Would it matter that I had not chosen to prosecute? And why would all these other people and some hypothetical embryo without mind or soul to demonstrate mind have more power over my sex organs than I did? I realized that I lived in a literal “state of rape,” a state with laws by which the middle class respectable men in the statehouse could control my sex organs just as the rapist did. What is the actual difference between them given that law enforcement is underpinned by the threat and use of physical police violence?

During the rape, I had had to decide what my chances were in a split second. I would have happily fought the man off to my death, because I had no fear of death. But the possibility that my body would be returned to my mom and dad dead, when I had been a planned, wanted child that they received as an answer to a prayer, was not acceptable. The possibility that I would live permanently seriously disabled and would be a burden on them was unacceptable. I could, out of love for them, endure rape.

But no love for anyone on this earth would have motivated me to be willing to give birth to a rapist’s baby. A baby combined you with the rapist and says you are one flesh with the rapist and that is a living idea. That is not the truth: it is bearing false witness against not only yourself, but against any God in accord with truth.

And I understood then that, if I could not get a legal abortion in my state or my country and could not get enough money to go to France or Japan to get one (Canada was anti-abortion then), and I could not find a place to get an illegal abortion, I would commit suicide. I carefully planned a suicide for the worst case scenario, to be sure that I would be unlikely to fail or, if I did, no one could use my comatose body to give birth to a violation of the truth before God. I was sorry if the people I loved would have to deal with the dead body, but this was an imperative higher than any possible human love. This had to do with God and my being true to what I loved with my whole heart, soul, and mind.

Understanding that, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty even if it lies only in laying down one’s life, made me so happy and relieved that I could pray. I knew, however, that my God could not want me to die at 21 (I had not even yet voted, as at that time the age was 21), just as God could not want me to be pregnant by some rapist maniac. And I could pray now.

I began reading the Bible carefully and dispassionately, three times, marking every passage that could have to do with pregnancy or my situation, and restudying each passage. It took about a week and a half, perhaps 12-14 hours per day. And I learned from this that not a line attributed to God or Christ or speaking of God or the Spirit of the Lord has anything to support the anti-abortion law mentality. And I was so grateful, and the next day, my period came.

I was grateful that had been able to demonstrate by the Christian Science and without consulting any medical doctor that I was not pregnant by rape. But in my prayer of thanks, I told God and Christ that many people do not learn Christian Science and do go to doctors for their physical problems. Christ could never have demonstrated for us over rape pregnancy because he did not have the female equipment for it, so a sister had to do it, and I accepted that, but mine was a prayer of protest, too.

If we are all equal in the sight of God, this threat of pregnancy was unfair, because this was worse than just crucifixion – it was about being forced against your will to use your life to give continuous life to a lie against your conscience. And I conveyed to my God that there were other situations than rape in which I would refuse to be or continue to be pregnant, and other women might well have other bottom lines than I did, and their consciences could not be denied. So God was just going to have to make up to me for this as I asked in my gratitude on behalf of all women in the US that they have the legal right to choose and I specified all the conditions to be covered.

Roe v Wade came as an answer to my prayer in a quite clear and amazing way. You do not need such details, only to know that anyone who condemns that Supreme Court decision faces me, one of the many in this country who take responsibility as its spiritual mother, ready to die for its life.

When a woman gets pregnant, the embryo that invades her endometrial wall, forms a placenta using her tissue, and kills some of her immune attack T-cells and shuts the others down into latency, is doing that to her detriment, whether or not she wants the pregnancy and whether or not she was made pregnant by rape. Its cells and loose isolated chromosomes eventually begin to leak across the placenta into the woman’s blood, and in later pregnancy and childbirth this leakage increases radically. Recently, it has been found that the blood of a woman who gave birth to a male even 27 years earlier has male chromosomes in it. There are all sorts of chromosomes from the man.

This sort of change in a woman’s blood does not happen from having protected sex, which does not in any significant way alter a woman’s body. But pregnancy and childbirth alter a body forever. They can kill women, cause them permanent health damage, and even alter their blood, which can contain chromosomes from a man which can make them liable to lethal diseases for decades and perhaps for life.

A zygote is alive. It has inner resources to grow into a morula, and a morula has them to grow into a blastocyst. They can grow in petri dishes. Though it is illegal to grow a human one for more than 14 days in a petri dish, we know from objective scientific research that a mammalian blastcyst’s natural lifespan can be doubled, right in a petri dish, if it is fed with supernutrients – a human one could live a maximum of 20 days in that case, but it could not grow into a viable fetus.

A blastocyst implants in a woman is not just for nutrients, but for oxygen and perhaps for more. The resources drawn from the live woman’s blood are why it can grow beyond that doubling of the blastocyst’s natural lifespan. Hence, if the woman dies before a fetus attains viability, the fetus always dies. Her blood oxygen, the life of her blood, goes to the embryo or fetus from the woman’s blood, as it goes to all of her own organs and extremities. If this happens against the woman’s will, conscience, and freedom of religion, she is being forced by mindless, soulless biological force to sacrifice her life, the life of a soulful, mindful person, for an embryo that does not have life in itself but only in her body.

Jesus said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” and “You are my friend if you do what I tell you.” He did not lay down his life for his non-friends, despite all the lies many so-called Christians say. But zygotes, morulae, blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses do not do what the women in whom they live tell them, for the immune systems of those women tell them to get out. They are friends only if the woman consciously says so. Anti-abortion laws thus demand of women a greater sacrifice than death, a sacrifice of conscience.

This woman has spent her life, and will continue to do so as long as she has breath, protecting for women in this country the right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy. There are many millions like me.

From reliable statistics, it appears that about 50% of pregnant rape victims choose abortion. The claim that some of them commit suicide afterward always stresses those who feel guilty for killing their child. It takes no account of those who had already planned suicide because of the rape but wanted to remove the chromosomes of the rapist from their body beforehand.

If you have not been forcibly raped and faced the threat of forcible rape pregnancy, the issue of rape pregnancy is not one about which you can learn from books. If the girl or woman wants to continue the pregnancy and does so, that’s okay because it is her own life she is giving to it and she is surety for it. If the girl or woman wants to end the pregnancy and does so, that’s okay because it is her own life she refuses to give to it and she is surety for that. It is not the business of others.

You seem perplexed by the views that most of us hold. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is this …

Down deep, most people don’t think that a newly-conceived zygote is yet a human being. You can make all the theoretical, or theological, arguments you please. Yes, it is a new life, with its own distinct DNA. But at a gut level, most people just don’t buy the story … it’s not yet a baby in their eyes.

Conversely, most people do see an eight-month fetus as a baby. So no amount of theoretical argument about a woman’s right to choose, or self-ownership of her body, or whatever, will get them on board with late elective abortion. (They’re even squeamish about late abortion to save the mother’s life.)

Of course, this leaves a grey zone in the middle; and people draw lines at different points. But no amount of “slippery slope” argumentation will convince them that black is white, or white black.

Which is why our laws remain as they are … as frustrating as that may be to those convinced by the theoretical arguments in one direction or the other.

I am pro life and somewhat active in Republican politics. I find it frustrating that most Right to Life organizations won’t endorse local candidates unless they refuse to support any exceptions (sometimes life of the mother is tolerated). This gets people like Todd Akin in trouble. What works well locally makes you sound like an extremist when you run statewide. These same organizations become very pragmatic the higher you go. Most would find a way to endorse a pro abortion candidate for President once he won the Republican nomination. (“But he’ll nominate judges that might strike down Roe v. Wade.”) Refusing to support rape and incest exceptions are losing positions. The only hope for such candidates is to take the offense and emphasize the extremism of their opponents (partial birth abortion, etc)

I think it is really interesting to note that the men who have commented either indirectly mention women or not at all. Yet, all of the women who have commented directly address women. In other words, at least for the men who have commented here, the woman is irrelevant and her experiences have no value. The almighty fetus trumps the woman. They identify with the humanity of the fetus over the humanity of the woman. The fetus has rights, the women is a vessel.Perhaps the question isn’t “how do we say rude sounding things nicely?” rather “Why are we acting like this issue is about everything else but women?”

“people have a hard time saying that a healthy woman who deliberately had consensual sex without using contraception has an unlimited right to a later-term abortion.”

This is a fraudulent argument. Contraception fails frequently. The premise that abortions are the result of having sex without contraception has no business in this discussion.

As to a favorite argument of the anti-abortion folks–late-term abortions–a significant number of those are due to risks to both the fetus and the mother.

Sex-selection? What are the statistics on this? This is another red herring.

“a God who can bring great goodness out of unbelievable tragedy is a deeply human response.” Especially when that human is an anti-woman man such as Mourdock.

“Many advocates of legal abortion say that abortion is a tragedy.” And many women who walk the harassment line at abortion clinics have ended up in that very clinic when they have an unplanned pregnancy.

Speaking of fraudulent arguments: ‘the American woman’s “right to choose” when it comes to the 20 or 30 something on her way up the ladder who has found herself with a problem after an indiscreet weekend’ is another dishonest way of dealing with the abortion issue.

Before I respond to this, let me make it clear that I think a woman should always have control of her body. She has no ultimate obligation to the father of the child, to a religious institution, or the state. So, what are the numbers of abortions that result from this example, compared to the number that result from contraceptive failure or rape?

“Americans should never be expected to curb their sexual desires, or so the theory goes.”
Whose theory is this, other than a person who doesn’t want to make an honest argument?

“when used as a form of birth control, which it too often is”
How often is it? Do you have statistics on this?

As I noted above, late-term abortions are rare and most often the result of medical difficulties. So, this comment is the only thing about late-term abortions that is barbaric:
“Late term abortions are barbaric and the acceptance of them is the sign of a civilization in decline.”

“it is unseemly for men to advocate enthusiastically for abortion rights”

Is it unseemly for white people to advocate for the rights of people of color, or able-bodied folks to advocate for those who are not? Please, stop with the fallacious and ugly arguments.

For women ALL Roads to freedom and equality–economic equality and most particularly the ability to avoid poverty START with control of their bodies. If they can’t control how they get pregnant and when they will have a child then poverty is the result. — Deb Coop

Thank you for the article and thanks, to the responders, for their thoughts; I have learned from both.
I would offer the thought that the pro-life position is often voiced in the language of rights, but that upon elaboration it is something else than may be implied by that language than an appeal to rights in the sense of a political or contractual claim to be made on society.
The prolifer’s point is that a human, a thing possessing that nature, is a thing that has about it a quality unique among the things of the world. It is a who, a person, or even it simply at some point very soon may be a person and we can’t tell one way or the other. Because of this they think that it cannot be killed unless some case is made for doing so that can appeal to justice. This is what I think they are really trying to get at by saying “right to life.”
As an aside, to adopt such thinking is not to be dismissive of or to overlook the woman involved, the mother. Nor does it overlook that the connection, physical and spiritual, between a mother and child is deep and profoundly meaningful. What it claims is that the child and the mother are now both, as equal parties, to be accounted for in one’s thinking. Any claim that the mother has absolute authority to decide whether the child now, after the point at which it lives, should live or die can be assessed in terms of whether one person can have life or death authority over another.
So what is being claimed is not so much that the child’s rights trump the mother’s—tough luck for her—but that the child is in fact human and being human is not something that another’s rights of choice can hold sway over without considerations of justice. Since it is obvious that the child is innocent; it seems that it cannot be killed without committing murder.
Murdouch’s theological point obviously goes further than this, but the claim that a human life does not happen that God does not intend is a more broadly accepted claim than the claim that all is strictly ordained and intended by God, even rape. The theology may flow from the recognition of the good and uniquely divine nature of the human person, requiring less dogmatic or revealed theology then may be suspected.
All of this is just to say that the response that many prolifer’s make when talking about rape and abortion, which might look very like Murdouch’s, owes more to the “common-sense” essentialist philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas and the pursuit of the good than it does to any philosophy of rights or predestination. Such philosophy is very non-dogmatic in that it starts with the attempt to discover through the senses just what a thing is and then to require one to act according to that reality rather than anything else.
If a thing is, it is something. If that something is human, then it has to be treated with the respect due its nature, by beings capable of knowing things. This means hard things for people in the world; it always has. To claim that a woman’s suffering in this case is unique is true. But being unique in circumstance cannot alter the reality of the evil of ending the child, if it is accepted as present. To point this out may be to raise a hard truth, but it isn’t abstract in the sense of flowing from a removed ideal or dogmatic principle. Another pro-life sound bite, just as common as the appeal to “right to life,” perhaps would sever better : “It is a child, not a choice.” I think the mindset that produces the one produces the other, though perhaps it would be better served to speak more clearly in all cases.
Just some thoughts, with apologies that they aren’t better organized.

It’s true that, often, pro-life advocates “obliterate” the pregnant woman from view in discussing abortion, and this hinders them from having the empathy towards the woman that is necessary in constructing a viable policy framework.

But it’s also true that pro-choice advocates almost always “obliterate” the unborn baby from view.

Instead the pro-choice side uses the phrases “reproductive freedom” and “reproductive choice” and “healthcare decisions.”

Whereas the roe v. wade debates used to involve wrangling over the viability of a fetus and the definition of human life, those conversations, at least in the political arena, have largely vanished, in the same way that Bill Clinton’s call for abortions to be “safe, legal, and rare,” has made way for an unquestioning, absolutist position of “abortion on demand” for any reason and in any situation.

Thus, while the pro-choice side harangues the pro-life side for lacking empathy and concern for the rape victim in exclusive preference for the unborn child, the pro-choice crowd doesn’t even acknowledge that an unborn human being exists within the woman’s womb.

Unless, of course, the woman wants to have a baby, and then the heretofore unacknowledged baby (fetus) magically becomes a human being. IOW, it’s only a human being if the woman wants it to be — a position that is utterly untenable with science, as ultrasounds and quite frankly, common sense, make explicitly clear.

I think the pro-life side would do well to emphasize the science behing their cause more so than the theology, as science is something (ostensibly) the Left loves and understands. Unless, of course, it conflicts with their own biases.

@Doug – Thank you! That’s the part that drives me crazy, that the fetus has more rights than the woman. The adult woman’s rights to autonomy, privacy, liberty are all suspended once conception occurs. But that’s ok, because she’ll get all her rights back in 9 months, and can just pick up where she left off. She only has to be an incubator for the government for a short time. Can you imagine that this would be ok if it were men getting pregnant? I’m sorry, sir, you are on government-mandated bedrest. You can go back to the boardroom next Spring. Seriously?

What about a technological fix? We thought at first that the Pill was it. For many reasons, it wasn’t. But why isn’t anybody working on an artificial uterus into which a fetus can be transplanted (without undue difficulty for the mother) at some time “after conception and before birth”, preferably as early as possible? If the pro-lifers were serious about their principles, this would probably already have been done. But it’s easier just to guilt-trip women. Maybe more fun too, who knows?

Those who argue that the abortion debate is one of men vs. women and that if men also got pregnant there would be no debate ignore a political fact I learned as a young man, that the strongest advocates for prohibiting abortions, as was also the case for opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, were found among women. It also ignores the real life fact that most abortions are performed on women who are not desirous of losing their babies, but have been persuaded, with some degree of coercion, by their fathers or boyfriends.

The woman who resents the fact that only women, and not men, can get pregnant, willingly or unwillingly, and be obliged, legally or morally, to give birth to their children is basically resentful of her own womanhood, for it is that reproductive fact of life that is definitive of being a woman, that is the purpose of having a female in the created order. You might as well rail against God for having made you one.

Another point that seems frequently missed above is that the question of whether there should be rape or incest exceptions to statutes against abortion is fundamentally irrelevant to the choice of candidates to serve in the United States Senate or House of Representatives. If the members of that Assembly did their duty to restore the Constitutional order and pass the legislation necessary to overturn the holding in Roe v. Wade, they should never have to confront the question of whether to ban abortions or what exceptions to make to such a ban. That would be a question for the lawmakers of the states and territories alone to decide, predictably each in response to the will of their differing constituents.

The use of Latinized medical terminology isn’t an argument. Words like “blastocyst” with their science-fiction-y overtones certainly do not correspond to any woman’s experience of a pregnancy, whether wanted or unwanted. Rather one should ask why such pseudotechnical jargonese is used so insistently when more natural descriptors might be chosen. Such need for cognitive distance is remarkable, and sadly telling.

I don’t know why certain people bother spend so much energy trying to prove what nobody denies, or denying what everybody accepts. Yes, a child does depend upon the mother for his survival, both before and after birth. Yes, it is hard for her. How this proves that an unborn child is a trespassing vagrant, re-rapist-in-utero, or soulless vampire from outer space is hard for me to imagine, but then again, I don’t get my moral reasoning from Ridley Scott movies.

The fear of being desperately needed by a being who has an absolute claim on us emotionally, morally, and legally can be intolerable, and it is natural to want to find a way out. I feel that way now, and my children are 8 and 5 years old. But it is because they are my children and that I love them that the burden is so huge. I suppose abortion is like cutting the Gordian knot, but at a price: you have to pretend there was never any child at all, which begs the question of why you felt so trapped in the first place. In the end, I always get the impression that abortions happen because mothers don’t feel like they have any choice at all.

By the way, God actually commands abortion in the case of a child conceived in adultery, and He has provided His true Priesthood with a means to carry it out:

Numbers 5 (NIV):

12 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him 13 so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), 14 and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— 15 then he is to take his wife to the priest. He must also take an offering of a tenth of an ephah[a] of barley flour on her behalf. He must not pour olive oil on it or put incense on it, because it is a grain offering for jealousy, a reminder-offering to draw attention to wrongdoing.

16 “‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. 17 Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. 18 After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. 19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. 20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[b] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”

“‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”

23 “‘The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. 24 He shall make the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering will enter her. 25 The priest is to take from her hands the grain offering for jealousy, wave it before the Lord and bring it to the altar. 26 The priest is then to take a handful of the grain offering as a memorial[c] offering and burn it on the altar; after that, he is to have the woman drink the water. 27 If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse. 28 If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children.

There is no duty to rescue in the common law tradition. A person in a boat has no legal duty to rescue a drowning person, even if there is a moral duty to attempt a rescue.

For the State to nationalize a woman’s body for nine months in this circumstance strikes me as bizarre. You aren’t legally required to help a drowning person, but if you are a rape victim you could be required to endure the psychological and physical rigors of pregnancy caused by your rapist. God may require this level of saintliness, but the State cannot. Render onto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

The meme being shoved down people’s throats these days is that a woman’s rights are absolute. This flows naturally from the libertarian misconception, shared by Frum, that individualism outweighs the common good. Rubbish I say.

Whose arguments are the most goofy? God already knows from eternity which children will be sacrificed to save rape victims from temporary inconveniences which could easily be remedied by offering pregnancy leave, and additional paid leave or care services after birth until the child is either accepted or given up for adoption.

From a Christian perspective, the point is not so much compassion for the baby in the womb, as mischaracterized by liberals, as saving Frum and his ilk from their own folly leading them down the road them to hell.

“As I said, I’ve been on all sides of the issue. Abortions have been performed for thousands of years. As you know, abortion was legal in the United States from the time the earliest settlers arrived. When the Constitution was adopted, abortions before “quickening” were advertised without shame, and routinely performed. This does not make them “right” but it does make it a reality.”

This is an overstatement. Abortion jurisprudence in the early years of the Republic was heavily influenced by the decisions of the common law, and the prevailing view was that abortion should be proscribed. There was a great deal of debate over whether quickening marked the beginning of the fetus’s life or the so-called “vitality” of that life. There were also practical and evidentiary hurdles to prosecuting abortion before quickening. That is why some states did not prosecute abortion before quickening until later in the 19th century. As knowledge of embryology increased, the laws of every state were changed to reflect that greater understanding that quickening was not the beginning of the child’s life.

Furthermore, abortion was a very dangerous operation to perform in the days before antibiotics. Indeed, women who sought abortions were often considered suicidal it was so dangerous. The high birth rates in the early years of the Republic and the high percentage of women who were pregnant at the time of their marriage cut against the idea of abortion being “routine” during that time.

Linda also points to the number of women who die of unsafe abortions in other countries. This has little relevance here. First of all, it is doubtful that early-term abortion would be outlawed in most states even if Roe were overturned. But even pre-Roe antibiotics had greatly reduced the number of maternal deaths due to illegal abortions. The CDC found that 39 women died of illegal abortion in 1972, while 24 women died of legal abortion that same year.

“And many women who walk the harassment line at abortion clinics have ended up in that very clinic when they have an unplanned pregnancy.”